Shadow Elite: Selling Out Uncle Sam -- Who's Overseeing the Contractors?

[unhappycamper]

Shadow Elite: Selling Out Uncle Sam -- Who's Overseeing the Contractors?
Janine R. Wedel Author, "Shadow Elite"
Co-authored with Linda Keenan
Posted: August 19, 2010 08:16 AM

How far does the crisis of government contracting oversight go? Apparently, it extends deep into some of America's most hallowed ground: Arlington National Cemetery.

The Army Inspector General and the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight this summer have issued scathing reports on mismanagement at Arlington which they say has resulted in hundreds, even thousands, of graves mismarked. Salon broke the story last year, and here are some of the findings confirmed by government investigators.

~snip~

The issue of oversight is further complicated by the multiple layers of contracting and subcontracting that are endemic to the contracting system. Large contracting projects typically farm out areas of work to multiple subcontractors. While the practice makes sense in terms of assembling a variety of competencies in one project, it further distances government monitoring from the work being done and the ability to assess it.

In sum, when the number of civil servants available to supervise government contracts and contractors proportionately falls, thus decreasing the government's oversight capacity, and when crucial governmental functions are outsourced, government begins to resemble Swiss-cheese--full of holes. The governance landscape becomes vulnerable to personal and corporate agendas and to operations that are less than in the public interest.

Certainly the public interest hasn't been served at Arlington National Cemetary, and in fact a criminal probe has reportedly been launched. But it seems likely that simple, perfectly legal mismanagement and poor oversight was a key culprit here: cemetary officials saw their budget nearly double in less than 10 years, an increasing portion went to contractors, they were not trained to deal with contractors and they did not have a strategy before handing out the deals. This is a disturbingly familiar story in various corners of federal government. The difference here is that faulty oversight has led not just to waste and inefficiency, but real heartbreak for hundreds of families whose loved one or ancestor served their country, and assumed, in the end, that their country would do the same for them. They assumed wrong.

[Blue_Tires]

1. ttt